01 The framing does the work
A question like "are you happy at your mother's?" cannot be answered honestly by a child, because every possible answer is a verdict on an adult. Children know this at about five and manage it by giving whichever answer they believe is wanted.
Questions about things, on the other hand, get real answers. What is your room like now. What do you do on Wednesdays. Who do you sit with at lunch. Is the walk to the bus long. These produce detail, and detail is where the useful information lives.
The general rule is to ask about the week rather than about the arrangement, and about activities rather than feelings. Feelings arrive on their own, attached to a fact, usually about four minutes after you stopped asking.
02 When and where to ask
Not at a handover, not in the first hour, and not in the car on the way back if that car journey is short. The first hour after arriving is for settling, and questions during it land as interrogation.
The good moments are sideways and busy: cooking, walking, washing up, driving somewhere long enough to be dull. Those are the same moments recommended in things to do with children on short visits, for the same reason.
Bedtime is a special case. It produces genuine confidences and it produces them at the worst possible time to respond well. If something important arrives at ten past nine, acknowledge it briefly and come back to it in daylight.
03 What to do with an answer you did not want
The most important rule is not to react in the moment in a way that teaches the child that honesty is expensive. A child who says something difficult and watches an adult become upset has learned, permanently, not to say it again.
Acknowledge, keep your face ordinary, ask one open follow up question, and stop. "Right. What happens then?" is usually enough. Then leave it alone for a day.
Second, do not repackage it and send it to the other household as a complaint. A child's remark on a Tuesday is a remark, not a report, and turning it into evidence is the fastest way to close a child down. If it recurs, and it matters, raise it as a question rather than a finding, in the format described in messages between two homes.
04 Looking for patterns rather than moments
Single remarks are weather. Patterns are climate. A child who says a week was rubbish on one Sunday is telling you about that Sunday. A child who is flat every Monday for a term is telling you about the shape of the week.
Keep a private note of the pattern rather than the incidents: what day, what mood, what preceded it. Three or four entries usually make a cause visible that no single conversation would have produced, and it is often something logistical, like a club that finishes too late or a handover that lands after a long school day.
Logistical causes are the good news, because they can be changed. The mechanism for changing them is in the shared family calendar and in the annual review of the parenting plan.
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